Orlando Bloom and His Son Flynn’s Reaction to The Hobbit

Orlando Bloom resurrected his Lord of the Rings character, Legolas, after 10 years, in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The wig he wore was exactly the same, but it was new to Bloom’s young son, Flynn, who is not quite three years old now. “My son used to come every day to the set, and he’d see me at the beginning of the day getting the wig on, and then I’d pull it off at the end. And it would be funny because when he was away from me, and then he came back, he’d see me on set, and I’d run up to him; he would kind of look at me, he would hear my voice, but he couldn’t compute,” Bloom told VF Daily at a Cinema Society screening on Wednesday. The tot got used to it, eventually, but the actor says the first time his son saw him in the full costume was especially funny. “I called his name across the car park, and he saw me, and he went, ‘Aaahh!’” Bloom said. “And then he looked at me, he sort of did a double take.”

He says adding this character to the Hobbitstory was freeing. “I saw it like an opportunity to create a backstory for Legolas,” Bloom explained. “We weren’t confined by the literature, because, obviously, he’s not in the book. So to me, that creates the opportunity to explore who Legolas is prior to going into TheLord of the Rings, and so therefore there’s a few more layers. You see him in Mirkwood, which is perfectly feasible that he would be there, and, you know, there’s the father-son sort of dynamic, and then, of course, there’s the Tauriel character who he has an interesting relationship with. So for me it was like backstory territory, which was fun.”

Also new to the Hobbitfranchise is Evangeline Lilly, who plays the warrior elf Tauriel. She says that despite the woodland setting, the New Zealand set was nothing like that of Lost, the TV series in which she starred. “I spent the majority of my time in a soundstage, which is very different from Lost,” Lilly said. “A lot of green screen, a lot of talking to tennis balls and men in green suits,” she said, laughing.

However, she says, her action scenes were the real deal. “I gave a stunt guy a black eye accidentally; I had my knee busted out, and spent a week hobbling through stunts,” Lilly told VF Daily. “And there was another time where there was a guy who was playing a great big Orc, who normally, in his spare time, he does cage-fighting, and so he’s a very, very large, powerful man. And when we were in a fight, I forgot to duck when I was supposed to duck, and he made direct contact with my head,” she said. “And I was seeing stars. But I managed to keep going and see the fight through, and afterwards he told me, ‘You know, I’ve knocked out grown men with similar hits,’ so I felt kind of good about that. I felt vindicated.”

Lilly also says she loved the food in New Zealand. “They have the best dairy there,” she said. “I’m allergic to dairy in America; I’m not allergic to dairy in New Zealand. It’s the strangest thing, I know.” Lilly does have a theory on why this might be. “I swear to God, it’s the chemicals and the hormones, and all the crap that we have in our dairy here, and it’s so clean out there.”

There were no mythical creatures at the Lambs Club, where Moncler hosted a post-screening party, but we did spot Jeremy Piven, Patrick Wilson, Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol, and tech-mogul Sean Parker, who we all know loves fantasy in the woods.